How to Build a Women-Led and Women-Focused Legal Practice
What does it look like to build a law firm from the ground up that is intentionally and unapologetically women-led?
For us, Melissa Hailey and Elizabeth (Liz) Hart, co-founders of Hailey | Hart PLLC, a personal injury and insurance dispute firm, the answer started with years of friendship, rather than a templated business plan. Here are a few things that we've learned about building a practice designed by women, for women, and why we think it's one of the best decisions we've ever made.
It All Started with a Community of Women
We met years ago through the Women's Trial Lawyers Network. What began as a professional connection turned into regular happy hours and lunches with a small group of women attorneys. For us, it became a space to talk openly about what was really going on, both professionally and personally.
That kind of community matters to us. We know that being a woman and a civil litigator, often while managing a family, comes with a specific set of challenges. Having a group of women who understood those challenges, and could laugh about them too, built the trust that was the foundation of everything else. When COVID hit, Liz found herself at home with a newborn, watching her law practice and the world around her change at the same time. An idea started to form: what would it look like to build a law firm from scratch?
Be Authentic to Who You Are
One of the most important steps in building your own, authentic practice is being honest about what isn't working for you in the industry as it is. For Liz, that meant recognizing that most personal injury firms shared a certain look, feel, and message. They often use loud, aggressive, "call us now or else" marketing that never felt like an authentic way to talk to clients. She started asking different questions: What would it look like if I built this myself? How would I want it to sound and feel? What kind of clients would we want to attract? She felt strongly that there wasn't yet a personal injury firm that truly catered to women. She believed that the way firms typically communicated didn't reflect how women actually wanted to be spoken to during some of the hardest moments of their lives.
Choosing the Right Partner is Crucial
Once the idea was there, the next question was who her business partner should be. For Liz, Melissa came to mind immediately. But recognizing the right partner and actually having the conversation are two different things. Liz sat on the idea for a while, nervous about bringing something so significant to a friendship that hadn't yet been tested in that way. When she finally raised it over drinks, it caught Melissa off guard. Melissa needed time, and Liz respected that. But a week later, Melissa called back because she couldn't stop thinking about it. From there, the idea that had been swirling in Liz's mind for months finally had its missing piece, and then we began building what would become Hailey | Hart.
Get Clear on Your Core Values
Before spending a dollar on a website or signing a lease, we did the foundational work first: identifying our core values, both as people and as future business owners. That foundation shaped every decision that followed: how we wanted to lead, how we wanted to be perceived, and what kind of firm we wanted to build.
Being women-led and women-focused came directly from those values. We believe that representation matters, and clients notice when the people leading their case actually understand their experience. That authenticity became a guiding principle for every choice that came next, right down to building our brand almost exclusively with women-owned and minority-owned vendors and contractors.
The Practical Side of Business
However, passion and purpose only gets you so far. Building a firm also means making a long list of decisions:
Personal finances and work/life balance: You need to understand what building a firm will cost you, personally and financially.
Vendors and contractors: These are critical to growing so you’re not trying to do everything yourself.
An ethics consult: Make sure you're set up correctly from day one.
Software subscriptions: These are recurring costs that need to be accounted for.
Harness the Strengths Women Bring to Law
In our practice, we have found that the intrinsic qualities of women lawyers are exactly what has helped our practice flourish. Here are just a few examples of how we run our business.
We aim for empathy and emotional intelligence to show up in small, consistent ways. For example, we like scheduling quarterly check-ins with every team member from the start of the year, rather than waiting for problems to surface.
Collaboration is built into how we work. Women are often skilled at building consensus and bringing in a range of perspectives, which is why weekly case meetings are structured so that everyone's opinion genuinely matters.
Storytelling and active listening are trial skills that women often excel at: reading a jury's reactions in real time and weaving facts into a narrative that resonates emotionally as well as logically.
Authenticity and vulnerability are strengths, not weaknesses. Being relatable and approachable builds the kind of trust that a purely transactional relationship never could. For us, this means being willing to connect with our team and clients as a whole person, not just an attorney.
Build a Firm that Reflects Who You Are
If you take one thing away from our journey, we’d like it to be this: the key to building a women-led, women-focused practice is to focus on remaining authentic, surrounding yourself with the right people, and being intentional at every step. For any woman lawyer considering starting her own practice, we urge you to listen to your instincts. It might be the start of something extraordinary.
Elizabeth (Liz) Hart is a founding partner of Hailey | Hart and specializes in catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, insurance bad faith, and elder abuse/neglect cases. Liz has handled multi-million dollar catastrophic personal injury, death, and insurance bad faith lawsuits in both state and federal court.
Melissa Hailey is a founding partner of Hailey | Hart. She is a respected trial and appellate attorney committed to pursuing justice on behalf of her clients while promoting integrity in the legal profession. Her work has been recognized consistently since 2016 by Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers.
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